Most Influential: Javier Pérez-Tasso

Pérez-Tasso brought Swift into the blockchain age.

Dec 18, 2025, 3:00 p.m.

When Javier Pérez-Tasso took implicit arsenic CEO of Swift successful 2019, fewer expected the banking inferior giant, known for handling trillions of dollars successful transactions betwixt banks each day, to physique its ain blockchain web conscionable a fewer years later.

Under Pérez-Tasso’s leadership, Swift has done conscionable that, softly becoming a behind-the-scenes subordinate successful blockchain’s organization pivot.

Swift — formally known arsenic the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is much than a five-decade-old banking inferior that handles trillions of dollars successful transactions betwixt banks each day. It fundamentally is the plumbing down planetary ligament transfers and securities trades settlement.

When Swift launched a aviator program successful 2022 with Chainlink, connecting planetary banks to aggregate nationalist and backstage blockchain networks done its existing infrastructure, the manufacture took notice. Although it was precise important quality astatine the time, fixed that Swift has been experimenting with distributed ledger exertion since 2017, it wasn't the biggest surprise.

However, the "watershed moment" came this year, erstwhile Swift announced that it is moving with a radical of implicit 30 fiscal institutions to physique its own blockchain-based ledger that tin facilitate 24/7 cross-border payments and marque them much efficient. This determination took the manufacture by surprise, underscoring that the "blockchain disintermediation" menace is existent for the accepted fiscal world.

What this monolithic determination by Swift proves is that executives and their firms indispensable beryllium capable to move, enactment nimble, and beryllium unfastened to adapting to caller technologies, making bold moves to enactment up of the competition. For Pérez-Tasso, an avid sports enthusiast, going connected the violative close present aligns with his attack to adapting caller technologies to enactment up of the competition.

In fact, during his assignment successful 2019, Swift's then-chairman, Yawar Shah, said that Pérez-Tasso "will guarantee that Swift tin proceed to physique connected its contented of excellence and innovation successful enactment of the planetary fiscal community, portion besides enabling acceleration of its endorsed strategy.”

A fiscal elephantine with a past spanning much than 50 years, which provides indispensable plumbing for astir each accepted fiscal institutions worldwide, is creating its ain blockchain technology? It undoubtedly speaks to Pérez-Tasso's quality to innovate and marque bold moves.

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